October 31st was the deadline for entries to the Hands across the Sea competition with Hendersonville Camera Club in North Carolina, and Susi Luard and Hilary Everett have had the unenviable task of selecting our final entries. Will Cheung FRPS, editor of Photography News, has agreed to judge the competition on-line for us.First of all, Susi thanked everyone who had sent in images and she showed us the complete pool, across the four categories: abstract, dereliction, landscapes and family. There were between 50 and 70 images in three categories and over 100 images in landscape. We needed five entries for each category and as many different photographers as possible, with no more than one image from any photographer in each category.

Susi and Hilary went through their choices and explained the qualities they were looking for. It was helpful that Will Cheung has written an article about ‘Scenics’, in Photography News, which set out his criteria and preferences! It cannot have been an easy job for Susi and Hilary and we thanked them for their time and efforts. This is the first time we have had such a competition and we know that Greg Lambert will be urging Hendersonville on, on his side of the Atlantic.

After the break, Hilary led a discussion about using specific apps available for iPhones to experiment with double exposures and slow shutter speed. Although not everyone could access the apps successfully - we needed the very latest updates, but we could all see the potential (see below) and were encouraged to be more creative.The non-iphone users met in their own corner and talked about life in general, so everyone was happy.

About PhotoSplit: 'we needed the very latest updates' - on the contrary, Jean! The latest iPhone iOS has changed the privacy settings so that you cannot choose to 'read + write' to Photos any longer, but the developer, who I have contacted, will presumably be changing the PhotoSplit software. It is the very latest updates that caused the problem.

Reply

Hilary Everett

10/11/2017 09:16:21 pm

It's really curious, Margaret, as I'm on the latest versions and I still have the option to "read and write" to Photos. I hope the developer comes up with a fix for you soon.

That was the first thing he sent me: a screenshot showing 'Allow PhotoSplit to access photos - read + write' at the top, but in my iPhone, the option is missing, so there are three options instead of four.
I am assuming you have different settings from me or a different phone.
I'm convinced it's an Apple privacy change and PhotoSplit has not been upgraded for it - but I could be wrong!

The latest update to iOS 11.1.1 has done the trick. When I opened PhotoSplit it asked me if it could access my photos - this is what it was not doing before. So now it works. But whether I had a defective upload of the last iOS I don't know. There is no way to contact the other club members who had problems.

Me again. I am just adding a note I received from James Liao, the developer of PhotoSplit:

'This isn't just you, this is due to a relatively new version of iOS changing the way one of the functions worked, which had been marked by Apple as no longer supported. This required me to upgrade to a newer function to interact with the photo storage system. In doing this upgrade to the new iOS version, somehow the settings file was not set correctly. I am not sure why the app was, at one point, working for some people and not for others. It's possible that the settings file on the phone was still the old one (that worked) but again I am not sure why this would be the case only for some people. I don't have a good explanation, sorry!'

PhotoSplit should now work for everyone, but there seem to have been lags in updating. I am just posting this so that if anyone else has problems I can refer them to it.